Okay guys i have been Trying to Debug this issue for Quite sometime now.I used to own 2 6970's but decided to give them to a friend, so thought to myself i would buy 2 Gigabyte 7970's OC edition. I started playing games with them all sempt to be running well, then reliazed they wernt running as well as they should be.. Most games whenever an intense scene comes in the GPU usage's on both cards drop to around 40% giving really low FPS aswell. Even during not so intense usage usually sits around 75%.

I even tried with 2 Asus cards with no provale.. that was with this system below..

You don't probably have a CPU bottleneck. You definitely have one. In intense scenes, your CPU has more work to do, and the GPU's are being starved of material to work with.

This will be obvious if you monitor your CPU usage as well. If you have HT enabled, a load level of 50%, as reported by Task Manager, means you're tapped out. Using something like Core Temp, 50% on any given core means that core is fully loaded. With HT disabled, it's 100% in each case.

And even apart from CPU-taxing episodes, two 7970's with a 1920x1080 resolution will be CPU-bound in the vast majority of games. That will be true of a substantial number of games no matter how much your overclock your CPU, too.

If you have HyperThreading enabled, and 60% is the total figure reported by Task Manager (or a like-minded program), then your CPU is definitely the limiting factor - that 60% indicates that you're even tapping more than one integer path per core.

An overclock would reduce that limitation, but I wouldn't use the word "fix". There will always be situations where the CPU can't keep up. Your goal should be to make the worst of those cases still very playable.

Read a lot about overclocking that 3820 before actually doing it, though. Because it doesn't have an unlocked multiplier, it's trickier to OC than a 3930K (where you can literally type "45" and get to 4.5GHz with no other changes). If you do a search for "i7 3820 overclock guide", you'll find several results worth reading. And start with your CPU cooler. Make sure it's a good one before even attempting to OC.

Water cooling just the CPU is actually pretty simple with fully integrated units like the Corsair H100. There, you just attach the block/pump to the CPU and the radiator to a case inlet or outlet. Ranges from around $65 to $110, depending mostly on radiator size.

For the whole system, things get pretty complex. And expensive. I recently did my first water cooling setup, and ended up spending over $1200 just on cooling parts. I went pretty high-end from the start, but you're still looking at several hundred for a halfway decent setup that covers CPU and GPU. I got to $420 just now for pump, CPU block, GPU block, and triple-120 radiator, along with estimates for fans, tubing and fittings. Reservoir is optional, but highly recommended, so add more for that. Going with really cheap parts, you'd probably still be looking at a $300 floor.

Your cooler certainly isn't the best, but it's a far cry from stock cooling, and it could very well be sufficient to get a decent overclock. Just monitor your temps when stability testing.

Originally posted by: wadawada55 If I were to Get a Dual GPU card du think that would resolve the issue? Such as 7990 or 690?

I get the distinct impression that you don't understand what the issue is.

Moving from two separate graphics cards with one GPU each to a single graphics card with two GPU's changes nothing, except the quantity of fan noise you generate.

The issue is that you're finding yourself in situations where your CPU cannot keep pace with the capabilities of your two GPU's. The only resolution is a faster CPU. And given how the CPU market works these days, that means overclocking the CPU you already have.

One caveat is if you mean Borderlands 2 by "Bl2", and you're playing with PhysX set to high. That game with that setting would actually run faster on nVidia hardware - or a hybrid setup, like mine, where a low-end nVidia card is configured to handle hardware PhysX. That's because the CPU is taken largely out of the loop. Changing that setting to low or normal with your existing setup would significantly improve the frame rate, at the expense of some eye candy.